I’ve been having some email with John Walker about his article, “Computation, Memory, Nature, and Life,” which I discussed on my blog yesterday.

And I realized that my goal in my novel(?)-in-progress is to have wind, leaves, water, clouds really be computing conscious mind stuff. I want to migrate the beezies to nature instead of doing the opposite. I have this anti-extropian bent, you see, my goal is to sort of deflate the Singularity which is in many ways hype and a category mistake. I want the computers to shrivel away. And I want Nature to wake up.

QUESTION: How SFictionally can I tweak nature to achieve this?

Walker’s suggested obstacle to doing this is, again, that even if a fluttering leaf is capable of class-four universal computation, it doesn’t seem like it gets all that far, as, after all, we don’t see vast innovations coming from the leaves. He feels they don’t get that far because they don’t have reliable long-term memory. The leaf doesn’t “remember” what it was fluttering yesterday or even ten minumtes ago. Even when in a continuous flutter mode, past states are lost to friction and averaging.

So let’s find all-purpose RAM to plug into any old thing. Where to find it? I figure in a parallel brane, or in the subdimensional network architecture of pre-geometry. A little supersymmetric 11-dimensional brane patch, hey?

I’m finding some possible tools for this in a new popular science book by Harvard/MIT professor Lisa Randall.

[Chief Execs of Monkeybrains, Inc., spotted at Fringale in San Francisco.]

Wondering about the relationship between humans and the net-based super-AI beezie beings, I’ve been thinking about an article by John Walker, “Computation, Memory, Nature, and Life”. He argues that life (and presumably intelligence) requires “digital storage”. Examples of what he calls digital storage in nature are: DNA, the human brain’s neural net, and the immune systems of vertebrates.

In Walker's words, “The fluttering of leaves in the wind, the ripples of water in a stream, the boiling of clouds over a mountain range, the intricate N-body ballet of stars orbiting the centre of mass of galaxy, all have no storage apart from their instantaneous analogue state space–they have no way to store and retrieve information in a robust and reliable digital form. Hence … these are not universal computations. They may be chaotic and unpredictable, but they can't be used in any manner to emulate any other computation, and therefore cannot be said to be equivalent to other computations or universal.”

[This shows a glass stomach made by artist Kiki Smith, part of her cool show at SFMOMA.]

I think it’s an interesting and suggestive argument, but I don't really think it's absolutely true. I tend to think that, e.g., sunspots could be alive, and reproduce, and eat each other, and even behave adaptively (as in Frek and the Elixir). But maybe in those sunspot tubes, there were certain long-lived vortex knot patterns functioning as a digital storage form, in which case Walker would still be on safe ground.

This picture, taken at one of my favorite resting spots in Yerba Buena Gardens in SF the other day, has several interesting features. The couple might be my characters Kittie and Sonic. I like the hairstyle of using enough gel to digitize your hair into a small number of distinct peaks. Check out the cool skull that the guy has hand-painted onto his wool suit jacket

And note the bumps of water meandering back and forth at the lip of the waterfall. I see these bumps as a class-four computation. And it seems like you could make them universal (assuming you idealized to make the waterfall arbitrarily wide) by forcing some bump pattern in and watching what happens. It's just a matter of emulation, innit? So I think you can have universality without digital storage, at least not in an obvious form. Although here, again, the info can be viewed as stored in the form of glider-like patterns of wave-bumps moving left and right.

Looking ahead, I’d like to think of the beezies as migrating out of the web and into the actual paracomputation of the world. Whether or not Walker is right in an absolute sense, he’s certainly right in the more limited sense that the computational speed and power of a natural process could be improved by somehow integrating RAM. I’m thinking of some string-theory method of attaching a little bit of RAM-brane to, like, streams and clouds. Animism made real.

[Totally gnarly piece by Kiki Smith called “Tale.” Funny for a novelist to see; thinking of how one crawls along, eating one’s way through life, extruding the long tale. But — ugh. Gotta hand it to women, they really can be gnarlier than men!]

Of course my all-purpose Presidential villian Dick Too Dodd (known as Joe Doakes in Mathematicians in Love) will want to damp all of this down. He claims he’s for a return to the old pre-orphidnet ways, but really, he wants to smash Earth into a Dyson Sphere of computronium where he can reign as a God.

As my character Kittie might put it, “Capitalists want people to be like sheep, and easy to fleece. Therefore they are against personal freedom, against quirky indigenous cultures, against self-expression, and against any non-goal-directed education. They want mass mind they can mass process. Like firm, tasteless, easy-to-harvest tomatoes.”

I went walking at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz with my fellow logician-turned-computer-scientist friend Michael Beeson.

The waves were still pretty big from the storms earlier this week. I love that instant when a wave’s smooth flow breaks into chaotic non-linear unpredictable spray.

I used to see that in my CA wave simulations, when for certain values the simulation becomes unstable and spits out scuzz. But here, in the lovely real world, it’s not really scuzz, it’s a different regime of computation with its own set of orbits and attractors, a computation so gnarly as to lie beyond the comprehension of anyone but the Big Pig, and maybe even beyond his/er full understanding as well.

As I say in The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, “My sense is that most complex physical processes are strongly unpredictable in the sense that they represent computations that can’t be run any faster at all. Think of surf hitting a rock and shooting a plume into the air. Those incredibly intricate little bumps and wiggles in the foam — no way will anyone ever be able to produce a detailed, accurate, long-term emulation of a wave by any means short of making a physical copy of the wave.”

Being physical is a big thing that AIs are lacking, you wave.

I already did a few corrections and revisions on the fictional passage I posted yesterday, by the way, but let it stand as is, a raw sample of the work in progress.

I’d been thinking of having my Big Pig Posse track down the Heritagist spammers hunched over PCs in a trailer park and gun them all down. I once read that most spammers and telemarketers are clustered in a single trailer park near Boca Raton, Florida, and I always like to imagine the Terminator showing up there to wreak hideous vengeance.

But Michael pointed out that people wouldn’t likely be using PCs after the Singularity, also that my heroes would lose the readers’ sympathy if they become hitmen.

So now I’m thinking maybe the Heritagists have enslaved some people and are using them as “devices” to pump out the spam. And the Pig Posse can liberate them.

Michael and I watched the surfers for awhile; I was proud that I actually knew one of them.

Mathematicians that we are, rather than surfing ourselves, we analyzed the mechanics of how surfing works. (a) You’re sliding down a hill of water that moves, and (b) Because you’re sliding, you have the ability to move the board to the left or right beneath your center of gravity (by steering it), also the board will have very little tendency to move backwards, with the upshot that it’s easier to balance on a moving board than on a still one.

I said one thing that made Michael laugh a lot: “Sitting in front of your computer and using a web browser — calling that surfing is like balancing a shared checkbook and saying you’re f*cking.”

I rode my bike to Lexington Reservoir yesterday. Great to see some sun. I started the third of my “Postsingular” stories. I’m linking the three together, and I think I’ll end up making it into a novel. This one has the working title, “The Big Pig Posse,” and is set about a year after the Singularity of the orphidnet has taken hold.

Jayjay and the Big Pig Posse awoke to a mustached guy prodding them with a wide broom.

“No chinges,” said Jayjay, his homeboy Sonic already standing at his side. “Stupid janitor.” The girls were on their feet too: Kittie and Thuy, their faces brown and greasy in the rainy-day October light.

“No mas janitor,” said the guy. “Maintenance manger and security guard. Get your pinche asses outta my hall. The Job Center’s about to open.”

“You want some of this?” taunted Sonic, grabbing his own crotch. “Este firme, Jayjay. We can take this pendejo down.”

“Can the gangbanger routine, boys,” said Kittie, turning and walking to the glass street door. “We’re already dazzled. Come on, Thuy. I’m seeing a bunch of fresh-dumped pancakes behind Monogrub. Still hot, if we hurry.”

Jayjay gave the janitor a little poke in the chest; the janitor swung his fist; Jayjay ducked. Jayjay and Sonic followed the girls out, standing for a moment in the rain-shadow of the office-building. The streets were liquid, the rain drops popping circles into the sheen, the spastic gusty wind making riffles, a few electric cars hissing past.

Jayjay looked into his head, checking the orphidnet view of the Monogrub trashcans, and indeed he saw a nice batch of griddle cakes, maybe a dozen. Only a block away.

But first, as long as he was focused on the orphidnet, Jayjay said hello to some of the beezie AI agents that lived there, and, what the hey, took a quick hit off the Big Pig up high in the virtual world, the outrageously rich and intricate Big Pig, stuffed with beautiful feelings and ideas like a birthday pi�ata, ahhh, the white light energy of the Big Pig.

In exchange for the hit, the Big Pig downloaded some temporary data onto Jayjay — the data blocks always had the form of incredibly accurate visual images, today it was a still from a movie showing a bearded guy’s head being swallowed by a gaint worm, beezie info coded no doubt into the angles of the worm’s teeth and hairs of the beard — whatever.

Thuy was in there suckling on the Big Pig too, and Jayjay laughed a little to see her next to him, Thuy his litter-mate, wheenk wheenk. They might have stayed there for quite some time, but Kittie was shaking his arm, wiry Kittie focused only on the Monogrub trashcan, worried that some other unhoused individuals might score the breakfast goodies before the Big Pig Posse could make the scene.

For his part, Sonic was standing at the Job Center’s glass door, projecting virtual emoticons at the janitor — turds, knives and skulls visible in the built-in heads-up-display that overlaid their views of the world, thanks to the orphids on their scalps like nanolice. The janitor didn’t care. He had a job, the Big Pig posse was in the rain, the door was locked behind them.

“We gotta find a steady place to sleep,” said Sonic as they splashed down the sidewalk towards the Monogrub parking lot.

“Ask President Bernardo,” said Thuy. “He always helps.”

In the year since the orphidnet had come online the whole world had become a realtime charity bazaar. Any neighborhood was like a storehouse, with all kinds of things waiting unused in attics, garages, back rooms, there for the asking. President Bernardo Lampton was all over this development; his Common Ground Party workers had managed to enlist a cadre of beezie agents to help people find whatever they needed. Bernardo had a strong interest in making the orphidnet seem good, what with it having come into being on his watch, and with the presidential election was next month.

“Where can we four live with no rent, Bernardo?” said Jayjay. “We’re tired of crashing in halls.”

Bernardo appeared in their overlays; trudging along next to them, dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweatshirt same as them. “Get an S. U. V.,” suggested Bernardo. “There’s a nice big one near here, with enough gas to drive it a mile or two. The owner would even give you the papers, camaradas.” Bernardo gestured and a little three-dimensional map popped up, with an image of a enlarged high-end S. U. V. angling out of it.

“We’ll be like yuppies!” exclaimed Thuy in a pleased tone. “Good old President Bernardo — hey! What’s he doing now?”

With an almost imperceptible glitch, control of the President Bernardo icon had shifted to one of his political opponents. Mouth stretched in a slack, imbecilic grin, the President dropped his pants, squatted on the sidewalk, took a crap, wiped his ass with a pocket-sized American flag, and then fumbled in his crotch to begin —

“Come on!” called Kittie, looking back at them. “We’re gonna lose the pancakes. Oh, what is that supposed to be?”

“Heritagist attack ad,” said Jayjay, looking away from the degraded President Bernardo Lampton. “They’re pumping out all these spoofs and spam for the election.” Lampton’s image duck-walked towards Kittie, the President leering up at her as he fondled himself.

A banner unfurled across their visual fields, reading Vote for Joe Too Doakes! Beneath it appeared two nearly identical men: former President Joe Doakes, and his recently cloned copy Joe Too Doakes. President Doakes had been convicted of treason and executed by lethal injection a few years back — the fallout of his scheme to turn the entire planet Earth into a Dyson sphere of nanocomputers supposedly running simulations of all the former Earthlings. It had come out in the trial that Joe Doakes also planned to use some special access codes to install himself as President-for-Eternity. But the U. S. electorate had an exceedingly short memory.

“I was a private man,” said Joe Doakes, with the very slightest gesture towards the obscene Bernardo Lampton. “A clean man. Unjustly executed by activist judges. We can have the good days back. We can have a lasting paradise safe from woe. Joe Too Doakes in November.” Joe Too crinkled his close-set eyes and waved, his face stern but with the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of his narrow mouth.